Archives: Letters to the Editor

Blind Freddy can see that Australia needs to properly tax its gas companies. We deserve a fair return for the resources extracted from our land, and we need to see gas producers pay for the enormous climate damage their operations cause.

Currently, the public is left carrying the costs: worsening climate impacts, rising insurance premiums, and the looming bill for cleaning up ageing gas infrastructure. The gas industry’s business model shifts environmental and economic burdens onto the community, and the Albanese government is allowing it to continue.

As Matt Pollard and Tim Buckley explain, the precedent, mandate from unions and business leaders, public support and Treasury modelling for a 25 per cent gas export tax are in hand. All we lack is the political will.

Jack is currently performing an extraordinarily vital role in attempting to achieve a functioning democracy in Australia. At present, as he recognises all too clearly, we have an oligarchy that has supplanted whatever democracy we had, with rule by an unaccountable political and bureaucratic class intent on protecting “the bewildered herd” from any information that might enable them to judge the performance of those classes.

Both have struggled mightily to achieve their Orwellian desire to control the public mind and consign transparency and accountability to the “memory hole”. Expectations of Labor were high in the mistaken belief that they had somehow escaped the clutches of that oligarchic mindset.
But as most of them are denizens of a modern political system that is isolated from the real world in which the rest of us live, it was probably too much to expect that they would be prepared to reform the system that bred them.

We now face the prospect of repeating the disaster that the similarly flawed system of the US has produced in Donald Trump, by electing the intellectual and moral midget of Pauline Hanson as our next PM!!

I agree with the article on the Grace Tame Foundation. Quiet pressure on funding is killing democratic debate.

Three points.

First, the problem is the pro‑Israel advocacy groups like AIJAC and the Zionist Federation of Australia. They actively monitor criticism of Israel and react quickly.

Second, no other lobby in Australia matches their power and speed. They pressure event bookers, sponsors, and universities whenever someone criticises Israeli policy or uses the word “genocide” about Gaza. This is not a conspiracy. It is organised advocacy. The question is whether it operates transparently.

Third, the term “genocide” is still contested in international law. The ICJ has not made a final ruling. But the speed with which pro‑Israel groups shut down any mention of the word clearly demonstrates their influence.

A child abuse survivor and former Australian of the Year lost her foundation’s funding after protesting the Israeli president’s visit. The public deserves to know who pressured her sponsors and why.

The original article asked institutions to come forward and explain. I support that call. Until they do, we will rightly suspect that powerful lobbies are silencing dissent through fear, not argument.

To take just a few out-of-order examples, we have recently seen the expulsion of the Iranian diplomats from Canberra, the abandonment of the Adelaide Writers’ Week, the targeting of Iranian holders of valid Australian visitor visas, the persecution of Mary Kostakidas, the imposition of an extra-judicial and extra-academic oversight on Australian universities, the invitation to the President of a genocide-enabling West Asian regime to address our National Press Club and now the defunding of the Grace Tame Foundation. All of this at the behest of the Israel Lobby which represents 0.4% to 1.0% of Australia’s population.

Our media, our government, our arts, our universities and much of our social media walk in fear. They have been intimidated and captured by an unelected, unrepresentative body working at the behest of a foreign power. If 60% of Australians rejected the notion of an Indigenous Voice which would have spoken for about 4% of Australia’s population, I wonder how many Australians would reject the notion of Zionist gatekeepers who speak for barely a quarter of that?

Jeffrey Sachs’ article covers a lot of ground with its examination of the psychological motives to the actions of Trump and Netanyahu – and there is a vast quagmire to be covered.

Personally, I think that Trump is closer to Mussolini than to Hitler – his braggadocio, malignant narcissism, abuse of even the most basic of societal mores while claiming to uphold Holy principles, malignancy, mendacity, avid pursuit of revenge against both actual and imagined slights, utter amorality – channels Mussolini.

Netanyahu is evil. Nobody would consider Netanyahu as other than a high-functioning sociopath, leaching off virtue capital Israel might have once held. He is more than sufficiently intelligent to play Trump like a ‘Harp from Hell’ – (credit – The Penguin from Batman Returns..)

Netanyahu is a player on the world stage and a prime exponent of unchecked power. Trump, however, is so far removed from reality that it is over the event horizon beyond terrifying.

In one of Trump’s latest expositions, he said:  “You know what’s a war crime? Having a nuclear weapon”

He is evidently either: a) in denial that his ally Israel, is known to have nuclear weapon. Or b) doesn’t care.

I suggest: b)

It is becoming increasingly clear that for peace to settle across West Asia regime change in Israel has to come first. Historically they destroy, they immiserate and then they deny the proof when that’s presented. The proof lies in the photos. Look at Gaza, look at Lebanon and now look at Iran. Everywhere Israel rears its head, razed buildings and dead bodies lie in windrows like dead leaves in the Autumn.

That Israel’s ambassador was invited to speak at the National Press Club shows us just how deeply the Zionist lobby has infiltrated the Australian political sphere. For some this is a good development. For others it is a matter of concern.

As this Ambassador spoke, we learned that those protesting the murder of Palestinians in Gaza were actually celebrating the murder of Israelis and Jews. This is an example of gaslighting in its basest form. I protested. I was not celebrating.

We also learned that a primary girls’ school was in reality a legitimate military target. That our Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister go along with this nonsense is a matter of national shame.

“Why didn’t China develop capitalism during the Song dynasty?” ( 960 to 1279)
Could it be that it has taken the western world until 2026 to recognise capitalism and its evolutionary Bastard democracy for the disaster that they are, not only for the planet but the majority of living things on the planet?

As Anne Delaney writes, “[The inquiry into climate misinformation] has brought to light compelling evidence that misinformation and disinformation are not fringe phenomena, but structural features of today’s information ecosystem, amplified by digital platforms, political incentives and coordinated campaigns.” While Australians can feel proud that the inquiry is a world first, it did not go far enough. Without truth in political advertising laws, Australians will continue to be fed disinformation with impunity.

AI-driven bots on social media now have the widest reach, but AI is also being used to fight back. It can detect fake accounts and coordinated swarms by analysing behaviour and network patterns that no real group of humans could physically achieve. The UN now recognises information integrity in climate and energy as a major barrier to effective climate action.

Resilience to disinformation can be built through education, as in Finland, where schoolchildren are taught to identify and assess manipulative content. Given the significant investment of wealthy individuals, fossil fuel companies and conservative digital campaign organisations such as Advance, Australia should invest in similar resilience programs. This is especially urgent as election cycles intensify online manipulation and targeted messaging.
References
Resilience https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/how-cognitive-manipulation-and-ai-will-shape-disinformation-in-2026/
Finland https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/28/fact-from-fiction-finlands-new-lessons-in-combating-fake-news

Is there a way of forcing the prime minister to stand down? He is a joke, patronising, is not what I’d describe as a leader and it’s time to replace him. I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Albo’s address to the Nation: an example of Artificial Unintelligence in action or just simple Noratory?

Not everybody can be Gough, very few can be a chip off the old PJK and get away with it even slightly. However, when we needed to see Albanese actually step up to the crease and swing for some boundaries, we got a cardboard cut-out of a PM holding up a hastily-prepared sign saying: ‘Normal Service Will be Resumed Shortly – we apologise for the inconvenience’.

Albo, it’s time to kick the Trump administration in the groinal area. No further episodes of Bluey allowed out of the country until he bloody well stops this whole Middle-East BS permanently.

American parents of younger children will run Trump out of town, at last.

Connie Peck describes Annie Jacobsen’s book about nuclear war as convincing. But in my view it begins with a dangerous assumption – that North Korea starts the war by sending an ICBM against Washington. This is as presumptuous as suggesting that once Iran gets the bomb, it will immediately drop one on Tel Aviv. Like all countries with nuclear weapons, Pyongyang has them for deterrence. This motive derives most strongly from the way Curtis LeMay bombed the country flat in 1951-53 in vengeance for the Chinese defeating US forces at the end of 1950 when McArthur so unwisely sent them north to the Yalu River. There is already enough western propaganda demonising Kim Jong-un (particularly in the Murdoch press) without pointing a finger at North Korea as the most likely country to start a nuclear war. For my money, Israel is by far the most likely country to do so against Iran.

How soon before people wake up to the amount of time their car spends parked and the potential of every garage and every power pole to be a charging point for their car at off peak time, all be it at a slow charging rate?

Further to David Spratt’s – as always – excellent article Has Climate Policy-Making Gone Completely Off The Rails? [April 7, 2026].

There is an inferred presumption among politicians and others, often in the media and the progressive advocates of ‘green capitalism’ that humans will be able to manage or even cope in a 3-degree world.

The late Will Steffen, who actually knew what he was talking about, wrote that:
“Some people say we can adapt due to technology, but that’s a belief system, it is not based on fact.
There is no convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37oC, will be able to evolve that quickly.
Insects can, but humans can’t and that’s a problem.
It’s clear the economic system is driving us towards an unsustainable future.”
(Science, 15 Jan 2015, Vol 347, Issue 6223).

What is painfully and dangerously obvious is that the ruling elites continue to prevaricate when it comes to the polycrises associated with climate change, their naive belief that humans will be a viable species in a 3-degree world merely attempts to divert attention from the existential threats.

Could it be that voters are finally waking up to the void between:
“The Privileged few” and the rest of us;
The Rich and the well-off;
Those whose children attend a “Private School” and with children at a private school
The landowners and the farmers
Those who start / benefit from wars and those who fight the wars.

Not a quick fix for this crisis but the cost of fuel to the consumer has always been manipulated for the benefit of OPEC, shareholders and influential nations. How many times have we heard in plain sight that OPEC has raised or lowered its production to suit?

OPEC Like all businesses are primarily concerned with PROFIT and without proper intervention the consumer /taxpayer will always foot the bill and rouge states will not be tolerated.

Why are most Labor “leaders” in Australia implicitly and/or explicitly hostile to Palestinians and those who oppose the ethic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians?

There is an explanation in Vaclavel Havel’s 1979 meditation of political dissent – the nature of suppression and the falsehoods and intimidation that respond to dissent.

Havel argued that most of us live in a lie and that, instead, it is possible to live within the truth.

Most Labor “leaders” throughout Australia prefer to live in a lie – that there is international law, that Israel is exempt from this law and ethnic cleansing and genocide by Israel is not ethnic cleansing and genocide.

What enrages these leaders is those who challenge this lie and, instead, live in and demand truth – the reality of a dehumanising, apartheid and racist Israel Government. This truth is inconvenient.

Not only will we never get an apology from Scott Morrison and the ‘ruined weekend’ farce, an apology will never come from Tim Wilson, Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor who in 2019 posed gleefully in front of a hydrogen-fuelled car. Such was their contempt for electric vehicles (and the push for more renewables) that they instead promoted a most unlikely technology and promoted the myth that EVs (not petrol) would ruin our weekends. Nor will we see an explanation from Taylor or Joyce about the closing of Australian oil refineries. They could admit that, with the oligopolisation of oil, and our relatively small population, they made a decision based on business alone. To accuse Labor of being “asleep at the wheel” seemingly tracks well in this grievance-infested, ahistorical present. What of the future? John Blackman and other security experts have for decades warned of the dangers of oil dependence. The push for more local oil is coming from miners and those same ‘lost weekend’ elements in Canberra, still resisting the obvious: electrifying our transport system via renewables is urgent, (even more urgent than those energy-hungry data centres), doable, healthier and cheaper than oil will ever be.

Re Mike Gilligan’s article: Trump is now saying the US doesn’t need Gulf oil, so he says it is up to us to organise supplies ourselves. Pulling together, we, the EU, China, the GCC, Japan and Korea plus other willing parties could negotiate a satisfactory deal with Iran, using our highly experienced diplomats. Trump and his forces and group of inexperienced diplomats should vacate the field and leave it to us to reach a deal with Iran, just as he has suggested.

“What about free speech?” people of all stripes exclaim, in many and varied circumstances.

Free speech is not the absolute some proclaim.

Morally speaking, all speech carries responsibility with it. This is recognised in law. Our hate speech laws are far from perfect but even in making such laws there is the implied as well as expressed belief that free speech does not mean anything goes.

And so we have to ask, why did the National Press Club invite the Israeli Ambassador to Australia to speak on its usually respected podium? To listen to the ambassador’s denial that genocide is happening was stomach-turning. WE SEE GENOCIDE EVERY DAY ON OUR PHONES.

It’s no wonder we read so much pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian propaganda in the legacy media. Bought, conned, gullible, true believers? The National Press Club has tarred all journalists with the pro-Israel brush. We can but take whatever they report with very many grains of salt. A once respected profession now measures with used-car salesmen. Sad. Dangerous.

Albanese seems to be cautiously warming Australians up for war. Instead of reinforcing the US’ bungled efforts and sacrificing our defence personnel for the sake of Zion and Trump, Australia needs to resign from AUKUS and all other US entanglements right now. Here’s why:
1. All countries with US bases are complicit in US actions and obedient to US commands. Australia will never be free and independent till the bases are gone.
2. Much of our weaponry can only be used with US approval, as they can turn off the software. So our defence rests entirely on this untrustworthy former ally.
3. The US is headed for collapse, economically, politically, socially and militarily. We want to be well clear when that happens or we’ll go down with it.
4. The US has tied itself to a dying, stranded technology, oil. The future is all with renewable electricity, as China shows. Australia has a choice – and more sunlight than anyone else!

I write to congratulate and thank John Frew for so skilfully and succinctly articulating the missing gap in talking about education and learning. For years in senior education positions, I tried to counter the neoliberal arguments about measuring learning and have done so repeatedly and unsuccessfully. John has captured the essence of context, cultural variation and measurement.

Well done John for your magnificent enunciation of the complexity and cultural non-uniformity of teaching and learning in schools that we continue to ignore in our planning.

Best wishes
Dr Gerald White

We had a 50 year lead in time, but we built border walls instead of fire breaks and water desalination plants. We bombed oil rich countries instead of switching to renewables to make oil theft unnecessary. We stockpiled weapons instead of digging dams for water storage. We subsidised miners instead of supporting our farmers. We allowed politicians to distract us with false narratives instead of pushing their noses into the issues that matter, because it was easier and we thought it was ‘their job’. We sowed resentment and division amongst ourselves over immigration when it will be ourselves, our children and grandchildren who will become the future migrants forced to move due to climate disaster…along any minute now.

It’s almost laughable how humanity can turn its back on the existential threat presented by our dependence on fossil fuels, our pandering to our baser nature, and our worship of technology for technology’s sake.

Once again Julian Cribb draws our attention to the dire straits into which we’ve blithely sailed. Maybe it was always going to be the conclusion of the human experiment. As Peggy Lee hauntingly asked back in the 1960s: Is that all there is? Now we’ve explored deep into the universe and touched the edge of infinity, is our role here on Earth done? Now we’ve exchanged our spirituality for materialism, has the miracle of life been denied us? Now we’ve surrendered our intellect to AI for a fistful of baubles will our instincts become superfluous?

Or was oblivion always the expected outcome for a species unable to manage its innate disposition for aggression?

Whatever the reason, it’s not in any way laughable; it’s as serious as it gets. The shift in weather patterns is clear for all to see and the scientific cause is irrefutable. We ignore both at our peril. Sadly, we appear contented to accept them as our destiny.

Australia’s well known reliance on diesel fuel for long haul transportation and, its remote location at the end of global supply chains has me wondering what governments of all persuasions have been doing in recent years?

Surely, with the advent of Covid, the global shocks of the Ukraine War and the increasingly erratic, shoot from the hip style politics coming out of Washington would have been red flags for someone in Canberra that we need to “war game” a range of catastrophic scenarios so if one does, God forbid, occur, there is a national blue print that can be immediately implemented by all levels of government?

It might be an old fashioned idea but plans work because people have had the time to think all the contingencies through without being under pressure. In times of increasing uncertainty it does seem sensible to me to have some detailed plans in place around areas such as fuel, water and food security.

Before the current stage of the Yankee/Zionist war against Iran kicked off, the Straits of Hormuz were open to tankers regardless of their origin. All the big companies mentioned in the article were thriving. The US military umbrella was deemed sufficient to protect that status quo.

Then the Yankee/Zionists attacked Iran for no good reason, killing Presidents and school children alike. Immediately Iran closed the Straits to all but non-belligerents, bombed those Gulf monarchies hosting US military bases causing a massive exodus of companies and their money toward Hong Kong, and exposed that military umbrella as being leaky.

After one month the Gulf monarchies are mostly in ruins, the vaunted might of the US lies in tatters, the House of Saud looks vulnerable and Israel lies exhausted through hubristic overreach. Israel still has nuclear weapons, a prospect terrifying to all but the most demented Zionists.

As for President Trump, does anyone think he either knows or cares what he has done?

The gas and oil crisis facing Australia today could end tomorrow if we lifted any sanctions we have on Russia and invited Iranian diplomats to return. And stop being such pathetic Yankee/Zionists tools.

As Jack so beautifully puts it, in an era of political banality we need examples of what it means to be a decent, honourable and exemplary Australian that is something for us all to strive to emulate. Mickey J was just such an Australian, as was Fred and as is Gabi. May their legacy continue to enrich us culturally, politically and socially!

It should never be forgotten that the government now in Iran that Trump seems so frivolously to wish to change is a direct result of US actions to overturn the first democratically elected government in Iranian history. The US and its ailing satrap the UK overturned the government of Mossadegh in 1953 and imposed their selection on the Iranian people.

That selection turned out to be one of the most vicious and violent regimes in the world at the time with its infamous SAVAK secret police who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians. Indeed so bad was it that the Theocratic government that has ruled since the 1979 revolution against that Pahlavi dictatorship was seen as by far preferable by the Iranian people.

Whatever we or anyone else outside Iran may think of it, it is a creature of the Iranian people forced upon them by the US and UK as their way of continuing to steal the Iranian peoples oil.

If we are to successfully deal with current events it is vital that we understand their context and who brought those events about. Part of that learning has to be leave the governance of Iran to the Iranians!

Surely it can no longer be contested, apart from the MAGA tin-hat brigade, that the Trump Presidency is a combination of a demented infantile psychopath leading a group of incompetent, alcoholic, misogynistic, brutal religious extremists. Its capacity for rational judgement and coherent thought is literally non-existent. Hegseth is simply the archetype of this band of products of the rapidly increasing fall of the American empire!

James Curran of the US Studies Centre sounds like he was born yesterday. Though making the right noises re the madness of the US/Israeli campaign, he qualifies that by pointing to the “mendacity” of Iran in the region. Iranian leadership , according to Jim, is “sordid”, “poisonous” and “demented”, quite unlike the west’s ally Saudi Arabia apparently.

Presumably, such impressions, and the general public shares them, are formed by the media, how else? And in that regard the idealism of the Lipmann quotation should make us all smile if not guffaw:

“[T]he news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumour, suspicion, clues, hopes and fears…….The task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct”.

Jim lives in Australia, is he havin’ a lend?

The news from the Senate inquiry on climate change and energy, that four senior government ministers in a position to take a climate lead are declining to present the climate challenge openly, provides confirmation that the Albanese government is reluctant to make clear the threats that we, as a nation, face.

It’s not as if they needed to fear mass resistance to the idea of climate crisis: Spratt cites reports that confirm that the majority think government must do more. It’s as though the government is avoiding any sort of confrontation. We are being swept headlong towards a climate crisis, led by a government that seeks to minimise the public’s view of that crisis, while the opposition – in both government and the media – seek daily to belittle that threat, to undermine the science that explains it, to deny its very existence. So the majority supporting stronger climate action is gradually shrinking as it is starved of leadership from the top.

It is so sad, at this most critical juncture, to see the party once led by Whitlam and Hawke, and in such a strong parliamentary position, so unwilling to accept the mantle of climate leadership that government bestows.